Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten : The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964

The Harlem Renaissance comes to vivid life in the spirited, forty-year-long correspondence between the black novelist and poet Langston Hughes and the flamboyant white critic and photographer Carl Van Vechten. Hughes was twenty-two and Van Vechten forty-four when they began a friendship that would last until Van Vechten's death. Between them they knew everyone from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright, and their letters are filled with gossip about the great and the forgotten, as well as with talk that ranged from race relations to blues lyrics to Harlem nightlife. It's a correspondence that, as Emily Bernard notes, provides "an unusual record of entertainment, politics, and culture as seen through the eyes of two fascinating and irreverent men."